Expert: Bioweapon plans can be ordered on Net

NEW YORK (CNN) --The New York Times has reported that formerly classified information about how to create biological weapons is available for purchase on the Internet.

Bioterrorism expert and scientist Raymond Zilinskas spoke about the issue Monday with CNN.

ZILINSKAS : These documents are not really available on the Internet. But you can order them through the Internet. There are documents that were published in the 1950s and the 1960s and once were classified as either secret or even top secret. ...

There were people working for years and years to develop formulations for biological warfare agents, and this is still not known to the public, and it still should remain a top secret.

Now this might be old news to the people working in the biological warfare program in the old Soviet Union and in Iraq, but it's certainly not old news to terrorists who are now working in the United States.

Most of the stuff is very technical, so you would have to have some sort of knowledge to use them. But again, you're not going to read it on the Internet. You're going to have to order it from somewhere, and once it gets in your hands, you have to have equipment.

You have to have the strain, the virulent strain of -- for example -- anthrax, before you can really do something. But it does give you a shortcut on how to develop, for example, the dry formulation of anthrax that we've seen in these anthrax-laden letters mailed to New York and Washington, D.C.